Search and Social Media Videos

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Attackers can exploit a bug in Twitter to force victims to follow the hacker's account, a security researcher said Thursday. According to Aviv Raff, the Twitter vulnerability could expose users to malware-hosting Web sites. "It can force people to follow you, which means all your twits will be showed in their Twitter home page...

A very cool idea in organizing rss. kinda like you used to go to the record store to look at (and usually spend half a paycheck on.. ) music. Go to Alltop to browse RSS feeds, TV Stations, newspapers, magazines, blogs, tweets, etc..

About Alltop: "Q. How do the Alltop sites work?A. We import the stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories (except Moms.alltop which has fewer headlines because there are so many feeds). When you place the cursor over a headline, we display part of the story so that you can decide if you’d like to read it. To read the story, click on its title. To go to the home page of the site, click on its domain name."

Twitter Support: "Good news for people everywhere: we've made some improvements for people who've protected their profiles on Twitter. Now you can have the same flexibility with followers that public accounts enjoy while keeping a level of privacy. The best part: no more mutual following required, and easier follower management!"

Yahoo founder Jerry Yang may have dodged a bullet by settling with angry investor Carl Icahn, giving him aboard seat and agreeing to open up two more. That victory was secured in part by talking one of Yahoo’s biggest investors, Legg Mason’s Bill Miller, into backing him.

Numerous independent sources are starting to see evidence of DNS cache poisoning attempts on their local networks, in what appears to be an attempt to take advantage of the “recent” DNS cache poisoning vulnerability

Monday, July 28, 2008

Twitter can be powerful for professional networking and collective intelligence. Here are ten tools that can help you become a Twitter power user and take full advantage of Twitter for business and professional use.

Share your Broker Dealer Horror Stories with us. Once you submit your horror story, we'll review your story along with others and select the most informative and entertaining story. Winners will be chosen every other month and they will be published in the Broker Dealer Journal.

"That's right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work."Good-bye, Google Bomb | The Trail | washingtonpost.com:

According to a report out Wednesday, antivirus vendor Sophos says it detects one Web page with malicious content every 5 seconds. -EEEEEK!!! p.s. i promise never to link to executables. (except i want the option to do so on April Fool's day.)

More than 75 percent of the bank Web sites surveyed in a University of Michigan study had at least one design flaw that could make customers vulnerable to cyber thieves after their money or even their identity.

SEO Haters: Misconceptions and Misinformation: "There is a harsh wind blowing through our industry. We all feel it. and if we don’t, perhaps we’ve got our heads in the sand. The truth is SEO’s are, for the most part, loathed.As a transparent and somewhat public SEO I personally receive at least one piece of hate mail per week. Whether it’s via email, a private message, a stumbleupon review etc; even though I’m an ethical marketer, people always seem to have a problem with what I say or do."

Twitter's Potential for Business Users: "Twitter, a social networking site that allows people to track each other by writing and exchanging short text messages, has spurred business technology leaders to investigate how they might utilize such a service to improve their organizations' ability to collaborate and communicate with colleagues and customers."

Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, has invested $2.75 in electric car startups today. Some of the money went to Aptera,a three-wheeled electric car company, and some went to Actacell, a spinoff From University of Texas. Go GoogleCar!

Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside of Google, and the two companies are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.

"MySpace on Tuesday announced its support for the OpenID movement, a free framework that simplifies users' online experiences by decentralizing their digital identity, and two implementations of MySpace's own Data Availability initiative with Flixster and Eventful."

"Hot-girl pics are to Digg users as lists are to editors. Unashamedly, we present the 50 hottest girls on Digg (okay, fine, the first 50 hot girls we found on Digg), and checked their profiles to determine whether they were likely to be real or fake." I thought girls on Digg were a myth!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Verizon Wireless has stepped into a steaming pile of complaints from animal lovers over commercials for its LG Dare phone, but the marketer is sticking with the 30-second spot. - gimme a break.. geesh!

"What are you doing?" is arguably the most inane question ever asked by one person of another, so one would think a site dedicated to that question would be among the most inane on the internet. That shows how little we understand both the internet and life.Twitter, as the site is known, is one of those hot internet sites we read about that give us cause to wonder about both.Twitter's market share of visits to social networking sites is up 500 percent for the week ended July 5 compared to the same week the year before, according to Hitwise. And Twitter's bigger still in the UK, ranking in Hitwise's top 50 social network sites. Twitter is based on the Zen-like notion that real life is what happens between blogs and emails, and those in-between moments are taken up by the most routine things: Brushing one's teeth, watching TV, listening to a dull speech, emptying the fridge.

Twitter uttered its first tweet two years ago this month. In effect it is a form of microblogging, where folks blog at 140 characters or less per entry. Twitterers can post tweets by logging onto the site, using software on their browser, by mobile phone or instant messaging. They can then send their tweets to all or to a select list of friends.

Just why people like Twitter is a bit of a mystery to some. Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise UK, believes that it is partly the lure of seeing how many friends and followers a person can have.

But for some it may also be to help build what Goad calls the Brand of Me, as a way of promoting one's person and increasingly one's business in life, whatever that might be. "They are trying to build up their personal brand online. So that when they try to get jobs they have their own brand online," says Goad.That's something that's common among bloggers, particular in the technology and media sectors, a group of people that Twitter is especially popular with in the UK.

There are likely to be a couple of factors explaining why it has captured a higher percentage of the population in Britain than the U.S. For one thing, Britons visit more blogs generally, perhaps because they surf both American and British blogs.Another possible reason is that Twitter is arguably more similar to Facebook, the biggest social network in Britain, than MySpace, which dominates in the U.S.

Signs that Twitter is approaching mainstream in Britain include the changing demographics of those visiting. In the past four weeks an equal number of males and females visited the site. What’s more, the age demographic is spreading beyond 25- to 34-year-olds, with some 37 percent of visitors now older than 45.

While more growth is expected for Twitter, Hitwise’s Goad wonders how much bigger it will get. "I don’t think it will become really mass market. It doesn’t strike me as likely to be as big as Facebook. I don’t think it will ever be the primary or only destination people go to for social networking," say Goad.

Instead, he believes, it is likely to ultimately be used to link friends to other content. So, for instance, if someone puts up a blog post, they might notify their friends by Twitter. By Heidi Dawley

Monday, July 21, 2008

American Airlines Drops Google Trademark Lawsuit from Bloomberg reports that the two sides have settled the search ad legal dispute. Each side has agreed to pay their own legal fees and the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

As Facebook continues to roll out the full version of its new user profiles, it ’s becoming clear that their primary goal isn’t to simply create a cleaner user experience and allow developers to have more meaningful engagement points with users.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In-house agency bars -- seemingly a relic of 1960s Madison Avenue -- look to be all the rage once again. We visit a smattering of hot spots where creatives, account managers and planners around the country are boozing nowadays.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - News), a leading global Internet company, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders.

"I worked for this company for over six years. Back in the day it was actually quite hard to get hired by Starbucks. Now they just need warm bodies to staff their cafes. They got greedy and completely over-expanded. The quality and the suffers and there was never enough time to properly train the new staff coming in. Sad. "- you would think someone is hiring all the ex starbucks employees?

Friday, July 18, 2008

Mr. Icahn and his slate lack the working knowledge of Yahoo and its Internet business needed to do two things that are required to successfully deliver a value-enhancing transaction for Yahoo Stockholders. First, they do not have the detailed knowledge to negotiate a complex restructuring of a large, innovative high technology company...

Yahoo CEO Yang: Shareholders Should Not Trust Investor Icahn: "Yahoo, Microsoft and maverick investor Carl Icahn have written each other more letters this summer than most kids do at sleep-away camp. In the latest public missive, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock warned the company’s shareholders: Icahn is not your friend, and cannot be trusted."

The new search engines I'm talking about are the semantic search engines, meaning they are search engines that can be queried using natural language (not keywords like when using Google). Behind the scenes, these search engines try to understand the meaning behind the text web pages and so when you query them, they map what your query means

Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Post by Ann Smarty over @ Search Engine Journal - Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection: "All tools listed below fall under the following criteria:they are all useful for SEOs; they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far); they are all free."

DISCLAIMER: Ann Smarty is an Search Engine Journalist, her opinions may not be the same as my own. However, it looks like she put a good amount of time into this post and while some of the tools mentioned, may or may not be "google-friendly", (as with any tool that automatically uses bulk queries on a search engine), please use with caution. She does have a good grip on SEO, so it's definately worth a look.

More and more, I hear in-game advertising mentioned along with search, display, and email as part of the digital marketing platform available for marketers to communicate with online consumers (you can throw mobile in there as well, but really that’s a variant of search and display).

Google will deliver its second quarter earnings Thursday after market close and analysts are expecting profits of $4.74 a share on $3.87 billion in revenue. Items front and center will include paid click rates, the integration of DoubleClick and any color on the advertising market in the U.S.

By Sue Zeidler BEVERLY HILLS, California (Reuters) - In a move that signals a possible thawing of Google Inc's (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) relations with Hollywood, its YouTube unit has reached a deal to feature film clips from Lions...

Today Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango, noticed that the interface changed yet again and now includes user comments. Like Digg, each comment has an up or down vote feature as well, and Google is using thumbs up and down icons that are exactly the same as those on Digg.

7/16/2008 10:53:00 AM In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See 'Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview' for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations."

A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony this morning from senior executives of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo regarding the implications of the Yahoo/Google ad sharing agreement. Their statements reveal diverse views of what constitutes "competition."

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- Several state attorneys general have started their own examination of Google's deal to supply search ads to Yahoo even as a congressional committee in the Senate and House hold hearings tomorrow to examine the potential antitrust implications of the deal.

BusinessWeek canvassed the Web's best and brightest designers—from Khoi Vinh of The New York Times' Web site to Don Norman, Silicon Valley's chief usability guru—to find out which site designs they rate — and which ones they hate.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Information Foraging in Information Access Environments: "Information foraging theory is an approach to the analysis of human activities involving information access technologies. The theory derives from optimal foraging theory in biology and anthropology, which analyzes the adaptive value of food-foraging strategies. Information foraging theory analyzes trade-offs in the value of information gained against the costs of performing activity in human-computer interaction tasks. The theory is illustrated by application to information-seeking tasks involving a Scatter/Gather interface, which presents users with a navigable, automatically computed, overview of the contents of a document collection arranged as a cluster hierarchy."

SEO Certification? There isn't any? Why? Because things change and developing any criteria would make those same criteria useless.

If you want to know how to hire an SEO.

Contact the Better Business Bureau.Ask for references.Look out for companies that will work with you on a month to month basis, SEO is a long-term activity and if you don't plan to be in business 5 years from now, don't engage in it.

Read what Google says to look for in a Organic Search Engine Optimization firm.

We know that in the world of search engine marketing, there are numerous metrics that can be measured. The trick is to determine which ones are the correct ones for your online campaign. So which ones are you tracking? Click for some you may have missed.

LONDON--What do you do if you are stuck in a field at a pop festival but there's trouble ahead because your mobile phone's battery is about to run out? Thanks to a new gizmo, you now just need to face the music and dance.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Should Google submit the protocols of its new TV Ads system's audience-measurement functions to the Media Rating Council for accreditation? That seemingly mundane question sparked an intense exchange between Google TV Ads' product manager, Keval Desai, and Clear Channel's exec VP for global research, Tony Jarvis. See the vid

Monday, July 07, 2008

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Orbitz Worldwide Inc said on Tuesday its Orbitz.com and ebookers.com websites have replaced Expedia Inc as the travel agencies for Microsoft Corp's Internet arm MSN.com in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In 2006, "The Long Tail" made a splash arguing that the Internet, with its expansive shelf space, would mean a smaller role for mega-hit products. Now, a study suggests the Web is only cementing the prominence of a small number of cultural favorites.- i say the study is flawed, searching for videos or songs involve a specific item not a general query.

Last week, in the context of Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit against Google's YouTube, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube. - I think Google should agree to give them a count, not the data.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

With U.S. Patent, Accudata Emerges as America’s Most Accurate Telephone Number-Validation Service Provider: "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has recently awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,373,335, entitled “System and Method of Processing Database Queries,” to Accudata Technologies, a data-validation service provider. Accudata’s idea for taking an Internet Protocol (IP) query and performing a protocol conversion to another network – such as Signaling System 7 (SS7) and Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) – originated in 2001. As a result of this patent, Accudata emerges as America’s most complete and accurate telephone number-validation service provider."